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Ryan Lu has over six years of experience in the life sciences industry and consulting and works extensively with both qualitative and quantitative research methods. He conducts primary interviews with KOLs, payers, and industry experts, as well as secondary research, market sizing, and financial forecasting for various therapeutic areas. Ryan works on a variety of projects including opportunity assessments, market/indication prioritization, partner identification for BD&L, volume/sales forecasting, and market landscaping.
Here, Ryan discusses the creation of a quarterly pipeline report for a group purchasing organization.
In this series, the consulting teams at Citeline and Evaluate discuss some of the key challenges that face the companies they work with across the pharma space. Learn more about how Evaluate consultant, Ryan Lu, compiled the latest trends in upcoming drug approvals for a group purchasing organization.
There are two main components to this project. This GPO [group purchasing organization] provides its members with a quarterly pipeline report as well as some insights based on Norstella data. So, the first component was our pipeline tracking report, which focuses on the major Phase III, filed, and approved products in the US. We break it down by indication across the area of interest for the GPO’s members. Essentially, it gives a clear view of what’s coming down the pipeline, especially those products that could be disrupted once they hit the market.
The second component was the approval tracker report, and this one really highlights the recent FDA approvals as well as the applications that received negative decisions from the FDA. And I think what’s particularly useful to our client is that it also points out which drugs are expected to get FDA decisions in the next 12 months.
So, together I believe these two reports provide a very clear snapshot of what just happened and a forward look at what is likely to come next. This will help our clients stay proactive and ready for upcoming shifts in the area of their interest.
One of the biggest challenges was the huge number of drugs that we needed to track. We are talking about thousands of assets. Normally I would say that for one or two people manually validating each drug and keeping it on track and checking its drug status can be quite difficult. We were able to overcome that challenge by leveraging our own proprietary databases and supplemented it with targeted secondary research to confirm the latest updates for each asset. The database we mainly use is Evaluate Pharma, though we also use Citeline’s Pharmaprojects for certain details.
So, I think the combination of the data-driven tracking and the expert validation really allow us to maintain both accuracy and efficiency at scale.
By conducting this project – or by developing this report – we have enabled the GPO’s members to get a much better, deeper, and more dynamic view of the landscape so they can now track how key drugs are advancing through late-stage development and identify which assets could reshape their therapeutic areas and also anticipate how the competitive environment may shift over time. Just as importantly, the reports also keep them continuously informed about recent FDA approvals and refusals. I believe that allows for faster and evidence-based decision-making. Ultimately, this level of visibility empowers the clients to stay ahead of market changes, not just react to events.
I briefly touched upon it earlier, but, as you can imagine, handling such a huge volume of drugs or assets can be quite challenging. So, we managed to find a way to validate the data in a very efficient way and also establish several formulas to extract the most relevant information from our databases. All the processes are now, I believe, semi-automated. Because we need to create it quarterly, having a semi-automated approach to generate this kind of report is quite critical.
Personally, what I found most interesting while leading this project was seeing first-hand how powerful the data can be guiding our understanding of the market. By letting the data lead the way, we were able to uncover patterns and generate some truly data-driven insights into emerging trends. This is not possible without such solid, comprehensive data at your fingertips. Without it, some insights might be hidden or might have been overlooked with a purely qualitative approach.
The Citeline and Evaluate Consulting & Analytics teams offers bespoke strategic solutions derived from their industry-leading products, along with the combined resources of parent company Norstella. These insights are curated by a global team of industry experts to address unique commercial challenges and help deliver life-saving treatments to patients faster.
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